The Album That Killed Prog?

bluetailfly wrote: schizoid_man77 wrote: The Whistler wrote: Yeah, Genesis is pretty sweet...never really had a chance to say that.   Are you allowed to say that? would mr.Anderson allow you?   Poor old ELP, they never stand a chance in any of these poll's, I think all of us need a nice dose of tarkus.   I don't think ELP as a whole is being judged here, just  "Love Beach" which deserves the severe lambasting it is getting.

Easy, THE SEX PISTOLS: Never Mind the Bollocks....

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: ghost_of_morphy wrote: So which album is the one that made you finally realize that prog was dead?   Yikes, I didn't knew that Prog was dead, lets close the srore and communicate the hundreeds if not thousands of new bands that they are loosing their time in a dead genre.   For God's sake, if Ptrog was ever healthier was in the early 70's and toda7y.   Iván

If albums could kill, all the Reggaeton my neighbours listen to would have certainly killed me long ago...

schizoid_man77 wrote: How about "forget th bullocks, heres the sex pistols"   Punk killed prog, not prog. Punk was music answer to music. Rebellious, sloppy, moshy freaks who dont know how to sing, play guitar/ bass, but they an play drums really fast, but with ZERO fills.

I think if one comes up with the question "Which album killed prog?" he means "Which album rung in the bell for that comparatively week period of the last 70s", when most of the big acts seemed to stagnate or nun out of creativity or even turned to pop. This is my point about "Animals", by the way. Maybe it is not so bad an album in itself, but it is hardly a progress after "Wish You Were Here". "Animals" sounds as if Pink Floyd are just going through the motions.
By the way, there were a few excellent albums in the late 70s, most notably "Xitintoday" by Nik Turner's Sphynx, "Fairy Tales" by Mother Gong or, to a slightly lesser extent, "Green" by Steve Hillage. But the so-called "Big 7" definitely ran out of steam.


Edited by BaldFriede - July 21 2007 at 03:01

micky wrote: you all are way off base.... the album that killed prog? ..  easy if you think about it. Tales from Topographic Oceans. everything else after it pales in comparison, prog never did..or could go higher..  the birth of regressive prog.

darqdean wrote: BaldFriede wrote: I think if one comes up with the question "Which album killed prog?" he means "Which album rung in the bell for that comparatively week period of the last 70s", when most of the big acts seemed to stagnate or nun out of creativity or even turned to pop. This is my point about "Animals", by the way. Maybe it is not so bad an album in itself, but it is hardly a progress after "Wish You Were Here". "Animals" sounds as if Pink Floyd are just going through the motions. By the way, there were a few excellent albums in the late 70s, most notably "Xitintoday" by Nik Turner's Sphynx, "Fairy Tales" by Mother Gong or, to a slightly lesser extent, "Green" by Steve Hillage. But the so-called "Big 7" definitely ran out of steam. I LOVE this site. We gather together in the name of Prog and can never agree on anything - that is how Progressive music has proven its longevity - by being so diverse that it genders reactions from all directions. For a short while in the late 70's and for most of the 80's that diversity of opinion may have derailed the bandwagon, but it kept trundling along.   You have managed to berate one of my all-time favorite bands (Floyd) while simultaneously praising spin-offs from two of my other all-time favorites (Gong and Hawkwind). When Animals was released, the contemprary Gong album was Gazeuse! while the Hawks released Quark, Strangeness and Charm - those are my top three favorite albums from 1977 (followed closely by Aerie Faerie Nonsense). It is opinions like this that keep me coming back here - if we all agreed it would be a terribly dull place. Any contradictory opinion always makes me re-evaluate my own opinion - and for this I will re-visit Mother Gong (I only have the much later Wild Child)   schizoid_man77 wrote: schizoid_man77 wrote: How about "Never Mind the bollocks, here's the sex pistols"   Punk killed prog, not prog. Punk was music answer to music. Rebellious, sloppy, moshy freaks who dont know how to sing, play guitar/ bass, but they an play drums really fast, but with ZERO fills.   See, T I say again, No it didn't.   I admit that the Hype surrounding the album was damaging to all kinds of music, (including Punk-rock itself I might add), and caused many musicians (not just prog musicians) to re-evaluate their own music. But the album itself was a forgotten history within six months of its release. If that was a death-blow then Prog was already terminal before then, but the evidence says that prog took another 3 or 4 years to slip into the background/underground.   If you are to pick one influential punk-rock album from that era it would be The Clash (s/t) - the only punk album that people still listen to today.

I thought about  "Animals" again today and tried to find out why I don't like it, and I think I know now. Pink Floyd never were masters of complicated composition. What they were masters at was creating new and exciting sounds. You can hear a lot of those on "Wish You Were Here",: the sound of the guitar in the famous four-tone motif and the machinelike sounds in "Welcome to the Machine", for example. Or think about the sounds they created in "Echoes. "On "Animals", however, all they come up with is the gimmick of using animal voices and running them through the synth a bit, which was outdated in the early 70s already. The rest of the sounds are all very well known, and so they reduce themselves to relatively simple songs, taking away their real trademark. And please don't go telling me how excellent the sound of "Animals" is; I am NOT talking about the sound of production. The production is as clean and crisp as always. They are suddenly the "emperor without clothes", and I think they look ugly that way.
Conclusion:: Pink Floyd are, in my opinion, a psychedelic band; take away the psychedelic element, and you have an ordinary rock band without any signs of "progressive". And they managed to do that on "Animals".

Well... The album that made prog unpopular...

I think it was not just one album, there were several CD's, but however, one album simply comes to my mind. I love it and I think it is one of the best recordings ever: Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973). I guess it is the most complex album ever recorded in rock history. Somehow many parts do not remind you on rock, it is fractional more like a symphonic orchestra thing with influences from far east. No album could ever reach the complexity of Tales From Topographic Oceans again, at least not in a musical sense. It became something like a symbol for many people's prejudices against the "elitist, pompous, narcistic and quixotic" Progressive Rock and albums like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1974) with lyrics so hardly to understand that even the band members of Genesis itself were asking themselves what vocalist Peter Gabriel wanted to reaveal in his songs (Phil Collins once said that he did not understand the story of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) boosted most people's impression of Progressive Rock, as well as the incredible gargantuan laser-shows by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the spacy performances of Peter Gabriel with Genesis.

I personally love the performances of Peter Gabriel and I do not have any problems with gargantuan laser-shows, but I guess many of the people in the late 70s had that.

However, I do not think that music has to reflect your own situation, in my opinion it is much more important if the music is good or not. And I say that Prog-bands usually made appealing, good music. But most of the people care more about the image of music than about the music itself. And the image of Progressive Rock looked very peaky in the late 70s.

People prefered a new music style that was easy to understand and Punk was able to experience its breakthrough, at the cost of Prog. The rebellious image of Punk seemed to hit the zeitgeist and the feelings of many teenagers. Of course many prog bands realized that and changed there complex style into an easy one: Yes (Tormato, 1978), Gentle Giant (Giant For A Day, 1978, Civilian, 1980), Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Works II, 1977, Love Beach, 1978) and Genesis (And Then There Were Three, 1978 and the following albums). Some bands were able to attach the new zeitgeist like Genesis and sold millions of albums. But most of the classic Prog-bands went under (Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, that indeed brought out a Prog album in 1980 with Drama but had no true future with Prog-music and disbanded as a Prog-band [but reunited in 1981 and played pop during the 80s]).

I guess it is all about the image. Not really about the music. Sad story, isn't it...?

Darq,